Hello , this is my first time posting anything on any website forum or blog area and I am sorry if i do not know the etiquette or protocols. This is my story.

My brother has a computer that is roughly a year old and pretty decent. He upgraded a GTS 250 Video card for a brand new ATI 4890 1 G GPU. The computer got passed the BIOS and proceeds to crash randomly at Desktop. The old computer's specs are irrelevant because we just went out and bought a brand new Gateway FX 1530 with everything in it. The PSU was only 500W because the 5770 that came in it is just about the most energy efficient thing known to man. We bought a 850 W PSU that runs 70 A on a single 12 V Rail Because we knew that the PSU in it wasn't enough to run a higher end GPU.

We Replaced the 5770 with the 4890 That he wanted to use in the first place. Then the EXACT same thing happened. Random crashes at desktop. Not TOO desktop, AT desktop. So on one of its better days we did a 3d mark 06 run and it scored in the 14k. Then worked for hours until we shut it down restarted and voila. More crashing at desktop. Can anyone help me out or have any oppinions on what to try? Oh P.S. We have Already RMA'd this card and it is STILL acting the same. We have cleaned the BIOS, We have tried old Catalyst and new Catalyst. We have tried resetting memtest and all that jazz.

This card ran for a month on a friends rig that is completely identical to the rig we upgraded from and he had no crashes.

So i Will clean this post up and add the Older computers specs and OS and the newer one, but this is a brand new Gateway FX with a new PSU and it is doing the same thing as the older one.

These are the current Rig minus the 5770. We originally thought that it was the Power supply because the 4890 is a beast of a power fiend but it is still crashing. Is it possible to get 2 bad video cards and have 2 of the 3 computers we tested it on have uncompatable Ram?

Hello, first time poster here as well. The dude the OP is referring to is me, we've both been beating our heads against the wall trying to figure this one out. I'm convinced the card is just evil. Not in that "oh I stubbed my toe" evil, but EVIL in the sense that it is willingly deteriorating my sanity.

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At the end I mentioned I was gonna swap GPUs with a friend, which is what we did. My friend Eric ran it for a few months, said it crashed maybe 3 times in 3 months and only during heavy gaming load. Now it's time for me to give him back the GeForce 250 I've been using (flawlessly) so I try the 4890 again, it crashes lots. I get that Gateway FX and uh... here we are as the OP described above.

Right now it crashes at the most random of times. When loading in to Windows 7 64bit it will crash to an ugly screen with lots of vertical lines. It will crash after loading into W7 and just sitting on the desktop. It has even crashed (today) when sitting on the BIOS screen starting at the BIOS menu. It crashes in roughly the same fashion each and every time. Either it goes to a really ugly screen with lots of vertical lines, or it goes to a blank black screen and the videocard fan starts cycling like it's powering on then off.

I've tried with Catalyst 8.6 and 10.7, this is across 2 separate PCs. When we moved over to the Gateway the OS was already installed (with a 5770) when I put the 4890 in. At the time there was no previous record of NVidia being plugged in anywhere in the machine's past. I can still try reinstalling via Safe Mode (assuming I can get that far). I'm not suspecting that it's a system RAM issue though since having the GeForce 250 installed now works like a dream. I imagine if it was system RAM it would persist in crashing no matter what.

I am tempted to return the 850W PSU I just bought, go back to the smaller one I already have. Take that money and buy a 5770 then RMA the 4890 and when it gets back, maybe find a "buyer" for the devil's card. I guarantee though when I do buy a 5770 (or whatever else) it won't be made by POWERCOLOR.